Besides technical error improvement, best way to increase organic traffic to movie review website

[JustinMurray]

I have a friend's website, ShowBizJunkies, that they work very had at improving and providing great content. I put the website in a more modern theme, increased speed (wpengine, but maxed out with cdn, caching, image optimization, etc)  But now I'm struggling how to suggest further improving the seo structure or building backlinks. I know trying to come up for those terms like "movie reviews" and many similar are ridiculously difficult, and requires tons of high quality backlinks.

What is my lowest hanging fruit here, any suggestions?

My current plan is:

1. Fix technical errors

2. Create more evergreen content

3. Work on timing of article release for better Google News coverage

4. More social sharing, sharing on Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook Groups, G+ Communities, etc

5. Build backlinks via outreach to tv show specific sites, movie fan sites, actor fan sites (interviews)

[94501]

One area that we've had a lot of success with is user generated content. I see it's possible for folks to comment on the site. How much does your use of email drive those comments?  Maybe controversial opinions promoted by email to your list would gain deeper UGC. Better yet if you could segment media fans by personas. Creating thinner pages, say about a trailer review and then not having comments to deepen it makes for a lot of thin/highly templated pages.

You could also work a bit more on internal in-context linking to elevate the importance of various search pages.

I think in the incredibly competitive space of movie reviews, the site will have to focus smartly on nichier/longer tail searches.

Do you leverage youtube? What about some kind of embeddable result creating tool for self-obsessed tv/film fans to link to?

Just some thoughts. Curious to hear what you think. Good luck! Best... Mike

[JustinMurray]

Thanks for the input.

We just started capturing emails and will look into formatting content in emails to drive comments. I agree user generated content is a big opportunity for this website.

We are working on in-context linking, although it's already pretty heavy.

Yes, I was going to change the focus keywords to longer tail for less competitive searches.

We do leverage youtube, but i'm not sure what you mean by embeddable tool?

[94501]

Hi Justin,

By "embeddable" I was just thinking of some kind of social friendly gizmo/result that lures people in to find out what movie their life is like or what movie character or actor they are like or some kind of pop media crap like that for grabbing eyeballs out of social.

Until comments can deepen page text, you might want to "noindex, follow" and remove those thin pages out of the sitemap and index, just so Google doesn't find too many thin pages to whack you over the head with.

Best.... Mike